ATTORNEY GENERAL: MEXICAN COPS 'LIVING WITH ENEMY'

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Saying Mexico's police are ``living with the enemy,''
federal Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar is urging tougher laws to
eliminate corruption from police forces, newspapers here reported Tuesday.

``It is practically impossible to fire a police employee due to the
protection offered by the law,'' Madrazo said during an appearance Monday
in the northern city of Monterrey.

Madrazo's agency prosecutes federal crimes and also operates Mexico's main
anti-narcotics force, the Federal Judicial Police, which has been plagued
for years by corruption.

Madrazo said that of 800 Federal Judicial Police agents fired in 1996, more
than 400 been rehired -- with back pay -- because of legal requirements,
according to the government's Notimex news agency.

He said Mexico's constitution should be changed to make such cleanup
efforts easier.

Officials have long admitted that drug traffickers and other criminals have
bought off many policemen and there have been repeated, widely publicized
campaigns to fire corrupt agents. Still, corruption continues.

``Why, many times, can we not catch criminal gangs or those of organized crime?

The answer is that they are incrusted in our agencies,'' Madrazo was quoted
as saying by the daily Excelsior.

``It is like living with the enemy. We have the enemy in the house; we have
it outside and we have it inside. So it is absolutely indispensable that we
can purify our police agencies,'' said Madrazo, according to the Monterrey
daily El Norte.

In the latest large-scale cleanup effort, Madrazo said that only about 800
of the 2,800 agents of Mexico's former anti-drug center, the National
Institute for the Combat of Drugs, would be permanently employed by his
agency.

The Institute, which took a leading role in fighting drugs as part of an
anti-corruption shakeup in 1995, was disbanded in 1997 after its former
chief, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested on bribery and drug
trafficking charges.

Madrazo complained that Mexico's Supreme Court recently declared
unconstitutional laws that let the attorney general's office repeatedly
test police for fitness.

Despite the problems, Madrazo said Mexican police and soldiers seized 1,029
metric tons of marijuana in 1997 -- a figure he said was a record -- as
well as 35 metric tons of cocaine and almost 800 pounds of opium gum,
according to Notimex.

He said his department had arrested 10,600 people on drug charges in 1997.

Madrazo criticized the U.S. laws mandating that the president ``certify''
other countries as cooperating in the fight against drugs and imposing
sanctions on those that do not.

President Clinton must issue a new certification by March 1.

``Nothing is gained with censures and reproaches,'' Madrazo said, according
to the daily Universal. ``The basis is not mutual recrimination but
collaboration and recognizing that the enemy is not Mexico nor the United
States but drug trafficking.''